Concerning Flatmates
by erpsicle
Summary: Nothing ever happens to John Watson. WARNING: This fic contains Smaug!Lock (sort of) and more crack than a plumber's backside. Not to be taken seriously.


**Okay, I actually wrote this ages ago and posted it to tumblr, then completely forgot about it until a few minutes ago when I was going through my ridiculously messy writing folder. So have some absolutely crackeriffic Smaug!Lock (sort of?). Enjoy!**

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**Concerning Flatmates**

'Ah, here we are.'

John Watson drew up beside his old friend, giving him a curious glance. The larger man had stopped outside a laboratory door, one hand poised to open it, but he seemed to be in no hurry to do so.

'Er, before we go in,' he said, 'I should tell you…he's not exactly… I mean, he's a bit… you know.' Mike Stamford's broad features contorted as he hunted for the right word. John waited patiently, though inwardly he was already nursing several misgivings about this whole 'flatmate' business. 'He's a bit different,' Mike said at last. 'But in a good way!' he added quickly, seeing John's expression.

'Different as in into crochet, or different as in… dead bodies under the mattress?' John asked warily. His misgivings were multiplying by the second, and Mike's slightly nervous chuckle did nothing to improve things.

'To be honest I couldn't tell you- hey, hold on!'

John, who had turned away with every intention of walking out of the hospital and never coming back, felt Mike's hand close around his arm.

'Come on, mate. Give it a chance?'

John sighed. Mike meant well. Hell, nobody had _asked_ him to do this. Maybe Mike was right, maybe different was good. His therapist would probably agree; wasn't Ella forever telling him to get out, get a hobby, get out of his comfort zone? Maybe different was what he needed.

He cleared his throat. 'Alright.' Mike beamed at him. 'But,' John raised a warning finger. 'If he mentions crochet, I'm out of here.'

Mike laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. 'If he mentions crochet, I won't stop you! Come on, let's go meet the madman.' With that he pushed open the door and John followed him inside, wondering – not for the first time – just what he was getting himself into.

Taking a cursory glance around the lab, John felt almost painfully out of place. He didn't quite know what he been expecting; of _course_ things had changed since his days at St. Bart's – things tended to do that if they were given enough time. People moved on, machines were superseded and replaced, and everything rolled onwards. Except for John, that is. _Nothing ever happens to me._ 'Bit different from my day,' he observed.

'Oh, you've no idea,' said Mike Stamford. John made a dubious noise in his throat, eyeing a particularly impressive machine and feeling quite drab in comparison. _Thing's got more lights than a bloody Christmas tree_.

He almost didn't notice the lithe figure, moving busily about amongst the racks of test-tubes and beakers, until he spoke.

'Mike, can I borrow your phone? There's no signal on mine.'

John looked up – and froze. _A lizard_. That was his first thought. _There's a bloody great lizard in the lab_. He shot a desperate look at Mike, hoping – praying – for some sort of explanation, something, _anything_ to suggest that he hadn't gone completely mad. But Mike was busy talking to the lizard-thing, as calmly as you please, as if this was all perfectly fine and, indeed, entirely normal. There were many words John Watson might have used to describe this situation, but normal was definitely not among them.

After realising that no help was going to come from his old friend, John took a deep breath and turned back to the creature at the bench, fervently hoping that the giant, blazer-wearing lizard had been nothing more than a bizarre trick of the light. _Nope. Nope, it's still there_. And now it was looking at him. _Not a lizard_, he thought madly. _A dragon_. He'd seen lizards and he'd seen pictures of dragons – what kid hadn't? – and the thing at the bench, with its fiery red scales and golden horns protruding bizarrely from a mop of black curls, was _definitely_ a dragon.

It occurred to John, suddenly and insanely, that he ought to say something.

'Er…' he fumbled for his phone, his eyes fixed on a spot a few inches to the left of the dragon's head, and stumped towards the bench. He held the phone out stiffly. 'Here, use mine.'

'Oh?' Smoke curled from the dragon's nostrils, and John felt the creature's eyes on him. He swallowed. 'Thank you,' it said, sounding almost… surprised? A clawed hand reached out, plucked the phone from his grasp, and the dragon was soon busily tap-tapping away at the keys.

'…an old friend of mine,' Mike was saying, oblivious to the fact that no one was paying him the slightest bit of attention. 'John Watson.'

While the dragon was occupied with his phone, John took the opportunity to gather his scrambled thoughts, gripping his walking-stick as if it were the only thing pinning him to the world of the sane. _There's no such thing as dragons. No such thing. Can't be. Bloody hell Watson, this is what you get when you refuse to take your meds_. He closed his eyes, willing the dragon into non-existence. _No such thing as dragons, no such thing as-_

'Afghanistan or Iraq?'

John's eyes popped open. The dragon was ignoring him, and for a moment he wasn't sure if it had actually spoken or if it had simply been yet another figment of his imagination. 'I'm sorry?' he ventured. The words came out a few octaves higher than he had intended, and the dragon shot him an amused sort of look.

'Afghanistan or Iraq,' it repeated patiently. 'Which was it?'

Against his better judgement he found himself blurting out, 'Afghanistan,' and when the dragon grinned, revealing the tips of some very sharp-looking teeth, it took every bit of John's resolve not to turn and bolt for the nearest exit. 'S-sorry, how did you-?'

'Ah, Molly,' the dragon said pleasantly. 'Coffee. Thank you.' This, John realised after a moment of confusion, was directed at the young, mousy-haired woman who had just come through the door behind him. She, like Mike, appeared utterly unfazed by the dragon's presence.

John stared at her, taking his phone when the dragon handed it back to him and stowing it in its jacket pocket without any interference from his brain. _What does she see, when she looks at him?_ Not the bizarre, scaly creature he did, if the way she was smiling as she handed over the mug - flustered and slightly nervous - was anything to go by. _Just what the hell is going on here?_

By the time John surfaced out of his confused reverie, Molly had vanished and the dragon was bustling about again, saying something about violins that John was apparently meant to be listening to.

'…when I'm thinking, and sometimes I don't talk for days on end. Would that bother you?' The dragon looked up, caught John staring with a glazed expression (he was trying to imagine a dragon playing the violin, and finding that he couldn't quite manage it), and smiled. 'Potential flatmates should know the worst about each other.'

_You're a bloody dragon_, John wanted to scream. _What could possibly be worse than that?_ Instead he cast an accusing look at Mike, and said, 'You told him about me,' as though this were somehow entirely his fault (which, in a way, he supposed it _was_).

'Not a word,' said Mike, with an infuriatingly smug grin.

'Then who said anything about flatmates?' John almost shrieked.

'I did,' the dragon said calmly. It had finished whatever work it had been doing at the bench and was in the process of putting on a long pea-coat over its blazer. 'I told Mike this morning that I must be a difficult man to find a flatmate for.' _No. No, no, no, this isn't real. It can't be real, it can't be happening_. Those were the same words he had used earlier, when he had run into Mike. "Who'd want me for a flatmate?" he had said, only half joking… and Mike had brought him here, and now he was face to face with a violin-playing dragon who apparently only he could see and who knew…impossible things about him, and it was all _too much_…

'Now here he is,' the dragon ploughed on, apparently unaware that behind him John was _this close_ to sliding into a full-blown mental breakdown, 'just after lunch with an old friend clearly just home from military service in Afghanistan. Wasn't a difficult leap.'

'How _did_ you know about Afghanistan?' John heard himself ask. The dragon, wrapping a scarf around its long neck, ignored him.

'Got my eye on a nice little place in central London. Together we ought to be able to afford it.' He swept past John, (_a tail, he has a bloody __**tail**__!_) pausing just long enough to inform him that they would meet there at seven o-clock tomorrow evening and that he was terribly sorry but he had to dash; he'd left his riding-crop in the mortuary. John's imagination actually shut down at that point. He turned stiffly to face the door, wincing as pain shot down his bad leg.

'Is that it then?' he asked, amazed at how calm his voice sounded. He wondered vaguely if that meant he had finally cracked.

The dragon's head reappeared around the door. 'Is that _what_?' An irritated puff of smoke rose from its nostrils.

John gave the creature a level stare, and noticed, for the first time, that its eyes were a pale shade of blue. _How odd_, he thought vaguely. He supposed he'd always thought a dragon would have yellow eyes, or red. _Oh yes?_ snapped another part of his brain. _And you're suddenly an expert on dragons?_

Of course he wasn't. But it still seemed odd, somehow. 'We've only just met, and we're going to go look at a flat,' he said aloud, as if that were his only issue with this whole, ridiculous situation.

The dragon blinked once, slowly enough for John to note that it had one set more than the normal quota of eyelids. 'Problem?'

John laughed, because if he hadn't he might have wept. _Problem? __**Problem**__? Good god, why on earth would there be a problem?_ 'We don't know a thing about each other, I don't know where we're meeting, I don't even know your _name_.' _And you're Puff the __**bloody**__**magic**__**dragon**__!_

The dragon returned his stare coolly. 'I know you're an army doctor and you've been invalided home from Afghanistan. I know you've got a brother who's worried about you but you won't go to him for help, possibly because he's an alcoholic, more likely because he recently walked out on his wife, and I know that your therapist thinks your limp is psychosomatic, quite correctly I'm afraid. That's enough to be going on with, don't you think?'

John Watson had no idea _what_ to think. The dragon had delivered all this impossible knowledge at an equally impossible pace, and while John's was a hardy one, there is only so much the human mind can take all in one go. His vision pinched and darkened around the edges, and for one horrible moment he was sure he was about to be sick.

'Mike, I believe your friend is about to experience the joys of syncope,' came the voice of the dragon, from what seemed to John like several hundred miles away. It sounded bored.

'What?'

There was a sigh. 'He's, going, to, _faint_.'

_No_, John wanted to say. _That can't be right, I never faint…_ But the dragon had been right about everything so far, and as John toppled slowly forward, he had to admit that it was right about this, too. What was it he had he said to Ella? It all seemed so long ago, now. Oh, yeah. _Nothing happens to me_.

A red blur darted towards him, and his last thought, before darkness closed over his eyes, was that if there was a god he would be laughing.

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**To be continued... maybe?**


End file.
